Paul Neagu

The Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu, who has died aged 66, spent a life-time exploring the philosophical themes in sculpture. His work as both a teacher and a practitioner influenced a whole generation of British artists.

Like his great mentor, Constantin Brancusi, Neagu had to make a difficult emotional journey from Romania to the west. He arrived in Britain in the Seventies at a time when there were very few artists working in a cross-cultural context. Inevitably, he struggled against a British art world that preferred to see the artist as a maker of things rather than, as he saw it, art, and therefore the artist, as a generator of a philosophical world view.

Born in Bucharest, Neagu was the second son of six children. His father was a shoe maker, and Neagu claimed that this was his first real trade. His early wish was to study philosophy, but after a failed attempt to gain a place in 1962 he enrolled in 1963 as a student at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts, where social realism was the current and expected style. Here he made his first attempts at a clandestine abstract art.

By the late 1960s he developed theories about palpable and tactile sculpture, often by representing them as box-like shapes with open/shut doors, made mostly out of wood and leather covered in gesso, which related them to the great tradition of Romanian wood work.

In 1969 he was invited to show in Edinburgh, at the Richard Demarco gallery, where he further developed the idea of cellular objects. This led to his settling in Britain in 1970, eventually becoming a British subject in 1977.

Sculpture was the prevailing avant-garde art of the late 1960s and 1970s, linking Neagu through performance and film to a changing discourse about the role of art in society. In works such as Gradually Going Tornado, Horizontal Rain and Blinds Bite he made physical his interest in the philosophy of Steiner, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

Contrary to the current of sculpture in Britain in the 1970s, Neagu asserted that sculpture did not necessarily have to refer only to the means of its making but could find a language to express more complex ideas, albeit symbolically.

In 1972 he set up the Gener ative Art Group with five fictitious members, each representing a different part of his creative psyche. This whimsical group, which several critics accepted at face value, seemed to offer a practice of immense diversity.

Neagu's 1975 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, was the first time that his work was brought to a larger audience. Then, he performed Gradually Going Tornado - an attempt to make whole a human condition fractured by the tensions of a nuclear world. His performances gave birth to objects, which came to be like evidence left behind at the scene of "a crime". The "laboratory" was the abiding metaphor for studio practice. A place where the artist alchemically "mixed", allowing the "detritus" of experiment to be the work.

This was a proposition for a new kind of sculpture which had its European equivalent in the Fluxus artists such as George Maciunas, George Brecht, Robert Filliou and Ben Vautier. These objects "out of performance" had a peculiar tactility that seemed to give them a ritual feel.

In 1975, Neagu made his first Hyphen - it started life as a three-legged workbench assembled somewhat in the folk tradition of Romanian furniture. Quickly Neagu understood the immense metaphysical potential of this tripod structure. From it he evolved a complete anthropocosmic view which, in parallel with Joseph Beuys in Germany and, previously, Yves Klein in France, suggested a spiritual remedy for the ills of contemporary man.

This again went against British taste, but in its turn had a considerable influence on a generation of students. This work gave birth to a series of conceptual elaborations of the Hyphen and the Starhead (an elaboration of the hyphen), an example of which was commissioned to be placed outside Charing Cross, London, although bureaucratic obstacles prevented it going up.

At this time Neagu began to teach at Hornsey College of Art and at Chelsea School of Art. He was an influential teacher in that he had an international outlook, which was perhaps his main legacy to his students. His intellectual clarity was refreshing in an era when "making" seemed to be more important than thinking. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Neagu continued to develop the Hyphen as a form, but a rigidity entered his practice. It was as if the Hyphen too fully encapsulated a formal and symbolic world and that earlier inventiveness was left behind.

This somewhat accounts for the fact that the work has been publicly neglected for the last two decades.

In 2003, after much difficulty, Tate Britain acquired his 30-year archive and exhibited some of his work from the 1970s and 1980s. The vitality and inquisitive inquiry of the work from this period was to me, once again, an inspiration.

He married twice, in 1965 and 1997; both marriages ended in divorce.

· Paul Neagu, sculptor and teacher, born February 22 1938; died June 16 2004